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Yet another new Facebook update…

Following on from Kaleigh’s blog post yesterday about the new changes that Facebook have brought in, we have more news for you. Yes you guessed it, Facebook has made yet more changes!

f8 Conference

Last night (5:30pm UK time) there was a conference being held in San Francisco called f8. This was Facebook’s conference at which they were set to announce massive, huge, ground breaking news about what changes they would be making to people’s Facebook profiles. American actor, comedian and rapper Andy Samberg took to the stage at beginning of f8 to talk to the crowd and to get them ready for when the big man himself came on, CEO and President of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg. Facebook announced things last night that may see the way social media is used, change forever.

Who knows we could soon see other social media sites following suite trying to change the way their site is used or how people interact with it. However, I can’t imagine that any other sites will do as well as Facebook is doing now, and will continue to do in the future as Andy Samberg last night said that Facebook now has 800 million active users worldwide with 500 million of them logging on everyday! At the time of writing the world’s population was 6,916,505,016, so that’s some number of the world’s population logging onto one website in a single day.

What have they changed?

Facebook have introduced a lot of different changes, both to the site and the way that people will see their profiles. The big one being that they have brought in a timeline. This timeline is basically the story of your life, starting from when you were born coming all the way up to the present day.

The timeline will capture everything from wall posts to status comments and likes, from what apps you use to what games you play and it will put it all in one place. It also solves what some may describe as being a ‘social media problem’. You now have a way of going back through all of your previous updates, posts, photos etc. So if you ever thought to yourself “I wonder what I wrote three years ago today?” you will be able to go back down your timeline and it will give you all of your posts, photos and whatever else you did on that day. Obviously it isn’t going to be detailed all the way back to the day you were born but if you want you can add photos to any part of your timeline to make it as detailed as possible. The further back you go, the more of a summary your timeline becomes but as Mark Zuckerberg said “It’s how you can tell the story of your whole life on a single page.”

Now doesn’t this sound a little interesting? Well you can also filter your timeline by content type. So if you want a ‘photos only’ view of your timeline then you can have that view of your timeline, just like you can have a ‘status only’ view of your timeline. There’s also a new part been added to the fairly recent places part of Facebook. Now you can view on a map all of the places that you have been to and checked in at on Facebook. So if you check in everywhere that you go to in the world, let alone your own country then you will have a lot of different markers on your map.

What have they integrated?

Facebook have joined forces with Spotify and Netflix now too. Basically this means that you can find out what your friends are watching and what they are listening too. Thus discovering yet more new music that you never imagined you would find, let alone listen too.

They have also joined forces with the likes of CNN, the Huffington Post, the Washington Post and in a European first The Guardian and Independent have also teamed with Facebook to launch their very own Facebook apps. Also, News Corporation owned iPad app, The Daily has broken free from its iPad shackles and also has its own Facebook app. So there’s a lot focus on news online and with some saying that this will change the way people will view news it will undoubtedly change the way that the news companies will work from now on.

What is the usability like?

All of the apps and partnerships that have been created for this new version of Facebook will see the way people use Facebook change somewhat. There’s been a live ticker introduced so from now on anything that you view, read, watch or listen too will be updated on your timeline (formerly Profile) and it will appear on your friends’ ticker. The idea is that you have no control over what is updated on your Timeline and that everything is automated. Some people may not like this very much but it is something that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg sees as the future of social networking.

Will the new Facebook get many “Likes”?

So will this new Facebook be a hit with the 800 million users out there or will it not go down too well like the last update? Who knows, only time will tell how well it does, but Mark Zuckerberg had this to say yesterday, pretty much summing up what this new Facebook is – “You can connect to anything you want in any way you want. You don’t have to like a book, you can read a book. You don’t have to like a movie; you can just watch a movie. You can eat a meal, hike a trail, listen to a song, connect to anything in any way you want. You can make an order of magnitude more connections than you could before,”

That said I imagine that you will be able to connect to pretty much anything. Whether you do something like content writing for a living or even something at the other end of the spectrum like a gamekeeper at a wildlife park in Africa, there will be a way for you to connect with it and have it on your timeline for all your friends, or ‘subscribers’ as they’re now being called, to see. Facebook’s ideal is that they will open up a whole new online world to their users which will help them discover and also consume far more content than ever before.

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